Email aliasing/forwarding

What is email aliasing/forwarding?

Email aliasing (or sometimes called forwarding) is a method that forwards the emails sent to an email address to another email account. Users can log directly into this account, being either with your ISP, a third-party provider or us, and retrieve any awaiting email.

For example, let's assume that your current ISP email address is: yourname@yourisp.com.au. You are the owner of a business (which purchased a domain name and hosting), and wish to set up different email accounts for sales questions, information, and jobs. However, you do not wish to check several different email accounts. Instead, it would be much more convenient to gather all the mail in a single location. To solve this problem, you can create several email aliases: sales@company.com, info@company.com, and jobs@company.com all forwarded to the same address - ie. yourname@yourisp.com.au.

In this manner, any email message sent to one of the three aliases would show up in the yourname@yourisp.com.au account. This underlying forwarding process is completely invisible to the senders.

What are the advantages of aliasing/forwarding?

Email aliasing provides several advantages to users. First and foremost, it saves money. Normally, full email accounts on a server cost money. Internet Service Providers can charge a fee for each full email account hosted by their servers. If a company has a need for several email accounts, the cost of using several email accounts can easily increase. To save on disk space and money, many Internet Service Providers will offer the use of email aliasing at a lower cost to creating separate email accounts. Rather than create costly full email accounts, cost effective aliases are used instead.

Second, email aliases are easier to administer. Instead of managing the usernames and passwords for several different accounts, a network administrator only needs to access a single email account for everybody.

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